File shares have been a beloved way to store and share documents around various groups for years. Even though, many organizations moved to collaborative solutions like SharePoint years ago, File Shares didn’t lose their charm. Because of the ease of usage and historical knowhow, it continued to grow both in size and usage over years. I know many organizations who store say 5 terabytes of data in SharePoint, still have four times more data in File Shares. But things are not all rosy with File Shares. Why Move out of File Shares Let’s a take quick look at why we […]

Sometime ago, I wrote an article about how to achieve http to https redirection in Azure hosted VMs. That solution is still applicable if your Azure environment was built using Classic model and is using Cloud Services. Things are a bit different in Azure Resource Manager model and that’s for good, as it has become even easier to achieve the same. Problem Statement Let’s take a relook at what we are trying to solve here. You have web application (let’s say SharePoint, but this solution is valid for any other web application as well) hosted in Azure VMs, build using […]

In my previous articles about Azure Chat bot, I talked about how to create a QnA chat bot using MS QnA maker service and use forms flow for a waterfall like conversation within the chat bot. I found many fellow ‘cloudizens’ looking for a simple solution based on QnA template which starts with a greeting to the user and then continues as a default QnA chat bot, like this one. Problem With the default QnA template, you get something like this So, essentially a QnA Chat bot is just an unending sequence of your default dialog, which is expressed as […]

In my previous article, I wrote about how can we create an simple Azure chat bot based on one of the default template, Forms Flow, that Azure Bot comes with. That is good to get us started but to make anything useful, we need to extend the bot. In this article I am going to talk about how can we extend the Azure Chat bot with Forms Flow, we created last time, and Integrate it with SharePoint. This logic can be used to integrate both with SharePoint on-premise (2013 and 2016) and Online. Problem Statement We are going to extend […]

A few days ago, I wrote articles about Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step followed by Configure LUIS application for practical use in Azure bot and Create your first Azure Chat Bot with QnA Service – Step by Step. In this article lets explore how can we create an Azure Chat Bot which can have an interactive forms flow, i.e. a bot which can accept information as if filling a form and take some action based on provided inputs like booking a flight ticket or raising a support request. Half of the steps are similar to what you might […]

A few days ago, I wrote an article about Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step followed by Configure LUIS application for practical use in Azure bot. In this article lets explore how can we create an Azure Chat Bot which can respond to any questions based on a known knowledge database using Microsoft QnA Service. First of all of course you need to have an Azure subscription, you can sign up for free here. Once you have the subscription ready, go to http://portal.azure.com Step 1: Create an Azure Chat Bot Browse to New – Data + Analytics – […]

A few days ago, I wrote an article about how to Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step, Lets extend that article with additional details about how can we configure LUIS application and train it to be much more useful for practical usage.In my previous article, I covered how can we create a LUIS application. So, let’s go ahead and try to teach it a little more than “Hi and Hello” 🙂 To start with login to LUIS at https://www.luis.ai with your azure credentials. You should see the app already created (if you followed my previous article). You can […]

Hey guys, Automation and Machine Learnings are the new buzz words these days and Microsoft is leading the way. Azure Bot Service has been rolled out recently, which is currently in preview mode but has plenty of stuffs to try your hands on. In this article, I am going to explain step-by-step, how you can get started with Azure Chat Bot service using Natural Language processing. First of all of course you need to have an Azure subscription, you can sign up for free here. Once you have the subscription ready, go to http://portal.azure.com Browse to New – Data + […]

Hello Guys, In one of my recent SharePoint 2016 deployment (hosted on Azure VMs), we ran across an issue in which SQL Server 2014 managed backup was enabled for SharePoint databases. The size of all the databases combined was about 2 TB! The problem started when users started using the SharePoint application extensively, resulting in SQL transaction logs getting filled more frequently and hence SQL Managed backup triggering full backups of such databases during peak business hours multiple times. Now, whenever the backup used to get started, the communication between SharePoint server and SQL server started to show issues like […]